


What Happens Between the Lines

by capncrystal



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Backstory, Brother-Sister Relationships, Gen, How I Met My Dragon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 21:55:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5265104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capncrystal/pseuds/capncrystal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Until he met Vachir, Merritt's life was an absolute mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happens Between the Lines

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Merritt, OK?

The year before Merritt was chosen by Vachir, he had slept more nights on the streets than he cared to talk about. He also spent several nights in the hFomes of friends whose sons were his age, whose pity went as far as offering him a roof over his head and a hot meal for a few days, until their patience and charity wore thin. Home was no longer a pastel townhouse on the upper border of Charlotte, though he might have returned there if he lost his pride and abased himself in apology to his parents, but he also couldn’t bear the thought of seeing his sister and that kicked-puppy look she gave him when he failed to live up to her expectations. He hadn’t seen her since he stormed out of the house last spring, and the longer he went without speaking to her, the more impossible it was to return.

Home became a mobile concept, a rooftop when it was dry or a couch when he could get one. Home was the coat on his back and the song in his heart and was sometimes forgotten when the nights were bitter and cold. He was young and strong, and there was work caring for horses in Charlotte that he was still respectable enough to get hired for. There were friends who made him laugh and made the summer nights exciting as they pushed the boundaries of what they could get away with, and there was a beautiful girl who made him want to do all kinds of crazy things, who made sleeping under the stars seem romantic even in Molly where everything smelled like garbage.

The month before Merritt was chosen by Vachir, he’d been arrested for a crime he hadn’t committed. The fact that he knew exactly who’d committed it and how it had gone down was not, in his opinion, anything the provost or his wolves needed to know. There was no real evidence against him, so he was let go after just a day. It was a sobering experience that brought all his fantasies of living like a poet crashing around his worn and ratty boots. The girl he thought he’d loved could no longer offer him hospitality, citing parental unrest, but he knew the truth; months of barely getting by had frayed the bonds between them. As the weather took a turn towards the colder, things either got steadily worse or he was seeing more of the truth through his carefully-crafted delusions of being all right.

The week before Merritt was chosen by Vachir, he had gone days at a time without eating, walked barefoot from the docks to the Mollyedge and back every day, and lost the girl he’d once intended to marry to the man who’d framed him to the Regina-damned wolves in the first place.

And all of it, the whole forsaken mess, was over a _fucking_ guitar.

 

~~

 

Merritt had grown up in the countryside at a grand old estate that was jointly run by his mother and her sister. There had been horses, pigs, more sheep than anybody knew what to do with and lots of space for a boy with more energy than brains to run around in. It hadn’t ever mattered much that he ran off whenever he was given chores to do, because there were helpers to do them for him while he explored the fields barefoot and hunted frogs. It hadn’t seemed to matter much that he neglected his studies the same way.

The only academic subject he’d ever excelled in was music, with decent marks in maths and abysmal failure in everything else. He could read, barely, and only because his sister painstakingly taught him when he drove away all other tutors by refusing to listen or do any work. At music, though, he was gifted. As a child he had coaxed melodies out of a pennywhistle and taught himself piano. Tutors were brought in to formally teach him notation, and the piano quickly became a privilege his parents could take away when he misbehaved, which was always. As a result, he abandoned the piano and developed a system of writing songs in his head, his natural overabundance of energy moving his fingers to the rhythm in his head whenever he was confined to sitting still.

When th’Esar offered his parents an official position in Thremedon outfitting the new military barracks building with electric lights, he was forced to choose between going with them willingly, or kick, scream, and attempt to run away only to be brought into the city anyway. Being a boy of 14 who had always gotten his way, he chose the latter.

His sister was old enough to begin taking classes at the ‘versity, but Merritt was too young to do the same and anyway not remotely inclined to an academic life. Merritt quickly found that Thremedon was far too confined for him; he had been an active boy in the country, and was a fidgety and ill-behaved one by city standards. He spent most of his time for the first few months finding private nooks to hide from his tutors and writing angsty songs that revealed the chained beauty of his tortured soul, or something.

What might have been a fairly standard rebellion for another teenager turned into a cold war between Merritt and his parents; he repeatedly shunned his chores and remained awake at night, when nobody was around to tell him to stop fidgeting or remind him that he was a disappointment. The best songs he wrote were finished in that quiet time just before dawn, the only time he could sing out loud without an audience.

The harder Merritt fought the constraints of the city, the tighter his parents seemed to pull the noose, so rather than live his life frustrated by rules he couldn’t follow he started pretending those rules didn’t exist. He made friends his own age in the groups his tutor brought around and in the handball courts down by the mollyedge and started staying out well past any respectable times. They experimented with whores, drinking, and illicit substances that made him feel like he could float away and live among the stars. He thought me would try anything that could distract him from the constant tension and energy in him; if it infuriated his parents instead, well, that was alright too.

Catarina played the diplomat when she was home, and truthfully things were better when she was there. Catarina, however, preferred her dormitory over home, and he couldn’t blame her one bit; his sister was well-behaved, but far from demure. She had her own quiet battles with their parents, and though she went about things in a very different way, she liked her freedom as much as Merritt. Sometimes, they met late at night at coffee shops that stayed open for the ‘versity students and night-owls. Merritt was often frustrated to near madness until these meetings, and drummed incessant little beats onto his edge of the table as he ranted quietly about everything that was going wrong with his life and how unfair it all was. Cat would listen very seriously, offer clever insights, and wipe away the spills under his cup. Occasionally she reminded him not to fidget by gently placing her hand over his, and that was more about keeping him from causing a scene than it was out of annoyance. One time, he spent a week sleeping in her tiny dorm while her roommate was visiting home. She got in a fair bit of trouble for it, as students weren’t allowed overnight guests. He didn’t visit her on campus much after that.

Life went on this way for two years. Things were mostly calm, if not quite good; Merritt maintained an uneasy peace at home and waited to be old enough for _something_ to happen, something to change his life and alter his destiny. He’d apprenticed under his parents, helping set up the lights for a large and ugly warehouse building which seemed to have no purpose. When he turned sixteen, the option to take a proper job under his father was there, if he wanted it, which he didn’t. Mostly, Merritt just counted the days until his birthday and thought about leaving home.

 

~~

 

Merritt had thought about riding dragons, but only in the distant way he thought about becoming a magician or playing in front of a crowd; it was fun to indulge, but it wou’d never actually happen. Th’Esar, bless his cold heart, had other ideas and had opened recruitment for dragonriders to anyone. There was no fee, no dress code, and no letter of introduction necessary; anyone healthy and bold enough to think they could _ride a fucking dragon_ could walk in and apply.

He’d thought that leaving home would grant him freedom to go where he wished, when he wished. He’d thought that when he left home in spring and he had continued to think that all summer long. There were no roots to him, nothing keeping him from picking up his things and leaving without any emotional investment in the places he’d spent time in or the people he’d come to know. As he walked from Molly to the military recruitment building in Charlotte with the early-morning cold of the cobblestone eating into his feet through his worn boots, he realized that leaving was more difficult than he’d expected. His anxiety was up and there was a temptation to turn around and return to Molly, to make it work, to live in relative freedom even if that freedom came with poverty and the occasional awkward run-in with people he’d known when he was still pretending to be a functional human being.

Merritt kept walking. He was young and strong and as of recently had nothing to lose, and he thought he could, just maybe, have a chance to work with dragons, even if there was no chance in hell he’d be chosen to ride one. His fidgeting could be hidden for a while, after all, and he had some aptitude with mechanics that might give him an advantage with the great terrifying beasts.

There was a decent crowd outside, which was only to be expected but still put him on edge as he walked through them. The applications and interviews were completed by a staff that were disinterested to the point of being unhelpful, but he was surprised to be put into a group of potential candidates within only a few hours of walking in. There was no assigned time to return, no chance to clean up or eat or, in his case, sit and shiver and let his anxiety overcome him; the group he was assigned to were crowded into carriages and shuttled over to the incomplete Airman building to meet their dragons. It was terrifyingly efficient.

As the carriage approached the building, Merritt looked out the window and saw scaffolding reaching up into the sky like bones of a massive urban beast. The entrance to the basement of the Airmen was a wide storm-cellar door to the right of the building. As Merritt was led inside, he looked around curiously; he had expected to be blindfolded, or for the location to be kept secret, but once he saw the pens he realized how very silly it was to think that there would be a need for that level of security at all. Anyone who wanted to break into the pens would find themselves face to face with a fucking dragon, after all. Just one, if they were lucky. He caught the light reflecting off the moving plates of a silvery metal wing and gulped; one would be _more_ than enough, going by the sheer size of that one. They were led past several mostly-empty pens, winding through a maze of doors as they tried not to sweat nervously. Their guide, Adamo, was a broad-shouldered, square-jawed man who looked as if he could take every one of them at once in a fight and win just by shouting at them. Just before he swung open the pen door, he told them that the first dragon they would meet was Illarion.

Merritt forgot to breathe. Illarion wasn’t as massive as the one they’d passed, but she was still twice as large as the largest horse he’d ever seen and far more majestic. A thin stream of smoke trailed out her nostrils as pearlescent eyes regarded them each in turn, then turned aside to curl in on herself like a sulking cat. Their guide rushed them out and shut the door in a big damned hurry, which was the first real clue Merritt got about the dragons having very particular personalities.

Erdeni was the next dragon they were introduced to, and though she also chose nobody from their group at least she didn’t seem inclined to set them on fire. One boy, a wealthy-looking one in a fur-lined bottle-green coat, stepped up ahead of the rest without realizing it. Erdeni nudged him with her beautiful red-edged metallic snout, making a sound when he fell on his ass. There were more sounds, like someone was playing a violin made of live humming wires, and he realized like a punch in the gut that she was _talking to the guide_. Not only was she talking to him- and he began to recognize it as speech, alien and beautiful as it was- but she was laughing at the recruits. It wasn’t an unkind laughter, really more like she was gossipping, but it changed him in a single moment from terrified to breathless and entranced.

There were practical considerations to consider. Merritt had worked with electricity as a youth, one of his father’s failed bids to civilize him. There were things he’d liked well enough about it, but the work itself was too structured, the days too long, and the pay too little. He remembered the work, though, and the frustration inherent in mechanical things not working as they should. Finding problems in the wiring was often a case of guesswork and frustratingly tedious experimentation. If the dragons could talk, then if anything went wrong, they could indicate where.

Merritt lacked the emotional distance for that to be really life-changing, though. He was caught in a familiar storm of energy, drinking in every detail of the dragons in a totally new light. They were people, for all they were made of gears and magic and shaped like bloody dragons, and he had never even considered that possibility. The riders chosen wouldn’t be going into battle controlling a mindless steed, they’d be part of a team (and boy, didn’t the need for the dragons to choose their rider suddenly make a lot more sense). Even if he wasn’t chosen- his heart constricted at the thought- he knew that he wanted to work with the dragons in _any_ position more than he’d wanted anything in a long time. He wondered if they liked music.

His hand started dancing, fingers tapping a happy beat on his thigh as his mind raced at the implications. He ignored the dirty looks the other recruits gave him and focused intensely on the third and final door they would walk through- the third and final dragon he would meet.

 

~~

 

“I just.” Merritt, fifteen years old and wound tighter than the gears in a pocketwatch, tapped a beat on his thighs and looked around suspiciously at the other guests in the all-night cafe. “I can’t even fathom what comes next week, let alone next year.” It was hard to breathe sometimes when he was tense like this, living a hell of anxiety that fluttered his hands and made his heart race.

“Sometimes it’s easy,” Cat mused, stirring her chocolate and watching the swirling dark liquid with the hazy intensity of someone who has not been intimate with their pillow in too long. “You just… know what you want to do. Like choosing a direction and walking it.” She made a pillow on the table with her arms and rested her head on it, thick wavy ginger hair obscuring her face with its fall. “Sometimes you see a million paths, though, and none of ‘em look any better than the others. That’s where you’re at.”

“I can’t go to ‘Versity,” Merritt looked over at her, whites showing all around his eyes. Desperation laced through his words like held-back tears. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. It was, very simply, an impossible future for him.

“I know,” she replied gently.

“So what the fuck do I do?!”

“I wish I knew,” Cat whispered miserably, and they spent the rest of the night in frustrated silence.

 

~~

 

“Mind your manners, boys.” Adamo seemed bored or disheartened as he led the potentials to the third and final door. “Vachir will have a look at you and then we can be out of here.” He clearly didn’t expect any better results here than from the previous two visits, and it seemed to depress him a bit; Merritt couldn’t blame him. He stopped thinking about the man, though, as soon as he caught sight of Vachir in her pen.

She was dark in color like slate and charcoal, with bright silvery-steel and pale blue accents. There was gold under her wings and in the gears he saw moving between the plates that made her body. She was perfect.

He stayed as still as he could, waiting for her to glance through the crowd and notice him. The frenetic energy that had filled him like a lightning strike had dissipated and left him with peaceful calm; He stayed in back and watched reverently as she nosed through the hopefuls like (his scattered thought supplied unhelpfully) a pig smelling a scrap of something delicious. He cringed at the thought; at the same time, Vachir drew back and huffed angrily. “A pig, am I?!”

So much for his calm.

His breathing hitched and he stepped forward, looking up at her with wide eyes. Everyone else crowded back out of the stall with Adamo protectively sweeping them back. Merritt ducked under his arm and tripped forward, landing on his feet very much within reach of Vachir’s very sharp talons.

“Pigs are terrifying,” he blurted out before he could remember how to shut up. “They ate my aunt’s neighbor when I was little.”

There was a moment of bewildered and horrified silence from everyone in the room, including the dragon. Merritt couldn’t look away from Vachir, not her sharp teeth and sharp claws and the stink of burning metal from the fire he knew was inside her, but from her opal eyes that seemed to glow from the stormcloud metal of her faceplate. He wanted to reassure her that he had thought of himself as the crumb she was seeking, he hadn’t meant to insult her, he was just like that sometimes, tripping over his thoughts like he tripped over his feet and he was beginning to think that if she just burnt him to ashes it would probably do the entire world a favor.

She made a sound like an amused snort and leaned in close, touching the very tip of her snout to the very tip of his nose and blowing his hair back with an exhale of hot dragon-stinking air. “Somebody has to teach you how to talk to a woman, puppy. Suppose that’s my job now.”

“Seriously?” He heard Adamo mutter behind him, rude in the way that very honest men sometimes are, rude in a way that meant he might question Vachir’s taste but he would stand behind it no matter what. Merritt reverently caressed the ridge under her eye, letting himself fall violently in love with Vachir and letting himself believe that she loved him just as deeply.

“He’ll do,” she replied.


End file.
